Left by Water, Left by Flame
by tore-my-yellow-dress
Summary: Death does not make appointments. Post 5x15.


**A/N- This is my first attempt at anything after 5x15. I'm devastated for Alicia. I'm devastated for Will. I'm grieving, and I'm exhausted because I've been up for forty five hours, and I apologize in advance if this piece is the biggest piece of crud. But, I'm still here, guys. I'm still here, and I'm still going to write for this beloved couple, and you know what? I believe love supersedes death. That's what I believe, right now. **

**Spoilers for 5x15, obviously. Everything hurts.**

* * *

"Will," she says against his mouth that moves languid, his tongue lapping at her jawline, makes her toes curl into the mattress. "Your hands are cold."

No matter what they're doing, Will has this way of turning her insides molten, making her putty in his hands with a single glance, and as it is, they're only half naked between the sheets- a lazy Sunday and Grace had a camping trip and Zack had a leadership thing for school, and no matter how the world is babbling, Will has this way of making himself the only thing she can think about. The only light for miles, in an otherwise dark era. He's cool like that. Has been since she first met him, with his dancing eyes, with his lips like drugs.

She'd always been afraid of the substances that left the addicted with shivers like bad habits.

Never knew, until she met Will Gardner, that it was possible to have an addiction to skin and a smile.

Will's lips are pulled heavenward, looking at her like she's gold, rubbing in circles his frigid thumbs against the skin of her sensitive, creamy inner thighs, and she's lying there, won't let up off his kiss, won't let go. Traces that mole on the base of his neck, arches up into his palm when he moves it inward, mumbles, "Let me warm them up, then."

It's a Sunday afternoon, and that means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Tomorrow, though, she'll have Caitlin's first trial. She'll have to gnaw at Louis Canning's runs, have to make breakfast in the morning instead of have it brought to her in bed. And she thinks, vaguely, that if she could stay in this moment, her nose buried in Will's neck, inhaling and _existing, _she would. She pulls away and grins so hard her cheeks hurt.

"What?" he murmurs, cocking an eyebrow and running a finger along the edge of her panties to tease.

It's hard to loosen her jaw, hard to keep the joy of fixation off her face. "I don't know," she admits, giving a slight shake of her head, leaning in, and he takes a moment to trace her lips, their curve, all soft. Reverently. Thinks to himself, _you are the most beautiful woman in the universe. _

"I'm happy," she whispers, finally, doesn't pull away from his attentions.

The look in his eyes is a chest full of candles.

"Me too," Will tells her, and only the reddening of the tips of his ears informs his ambiguity is more mask than skin deep. Still, she knows there's a high percentage of a chance she's overanalyzing, and it feels better twist her body beneath his hands, feels better to laugh breathlessly, and take his thin upper lip between her teeth. It's accident, when she nips him.

"Woops," he mutters, but he's muffling his own amusement by reaching up to wipe the blood onto the pad of his pointer. "Got me there."

"Sorry." A blush spreads across Alicia's cheekbones, and she knows, knows the ghost of his lukewarm fingers starting fires between her legs.

"Don't be," Will rolls his eyes, pedantic. "Good thing it's not more, hmm? Me and my battle wounds. The neighbors are starting to think you're abusive, with all the _screaming _and the scratches across my-"

"Shh," Alicia hushes him, and doesn't know what she's doing when she leans her head in, when she takes his wounded flesh, blood beginning to dry- when she pulls that into her mouth, too. The pain must be good, though, must be, when he groans loudly, threading his fingers through her dark fan of hair.

"Leesh," he calls her huskily.

She's never been one for nicknames, but he started it at Georgetown, and it doesn't matter if it's twenty years later and their bodies are different vessels. It doesn't matter if they are different people with different lives. If an affair is an affair, or if feeling good is the only thing left to hold on to. It's doesn't matter, because hearing him call her _that _still makes something in her jerk, and lying there, she wants to preen at the sound. How he says it.

And his own blood bursts copper on her tongue, couples with the tang of Will and his peppermint toothpaste, with the syrup in the pancakes they had an hour or two ago.

/

She stands in his office and holds him for the last time, all tied together with sentiments of missing, and it's like comparing a mountain to a pin head, like the feeling just before the rollercoaster starts to climb, and the fall is coming, everyone knew the fall was coming-

And she swears she knew the fall was coming, because Grace is more important, Grace has to be more important. Priorities are like leeches, these days, sucking her of all her strength and resolve, but that doesn't mean she's a bad person. She's not the romantic twenty year old she once was, not a believer in things she can't see with her own two eyes.

/

Here is a truth:

The last time they made love, they didn't know it was going to be the last time.

Had Will Gardner known that three days later his rights of spanning his hands across her bare, beautiful, naked body would be stripped, he'd have pulled out his deepest memory case to tuck away the images of her, with her smile like a tether, with her heart on her sleeve, with his mouth raw and bleeding, bee stung from her own nectar.

That last time was settling, was knowing exactly how to make one another feels good, and even if it had only been a few months-

He'd thought, for a moment, that all the wayward wandering, that all the nomadic points of destination on a map were gone for good. He thought she'd go through with the divorce, and even if he knew she'd toss and turn and heave over the boat rocking of her children, that he'd be there, no matter the storms raging, that he'd hold her and get to know her kids a little better.

That there'd be dozens of other lazy Sundays.

Because _one _of anything was never enough, and they knew better by now.

/

He didn't know his shoulder was going to give out when it did.

He was nineteen and dumb and looking back, if he could do it all over again, he wouldn't have just left the field with a tear. He'd have left it with any entire severance, would have gone hard. Gone hard and swung like he had the power to, because some things are rarely ever reach their full capability, and even if Will Gardner settled for that when it came to a gorgeous brunette who ate his heart with a silver spoon, he wishes he could have had that last great game.

Driven the car into a tree and been done with it, is what he would have done.

/

When people ask Alicia how she'd describe Will Gardner, she thinks a Friday night on the couch, takeout and beer, and it doesn't matter if they're hovered over law books at twenty something or if he's discussing a case in their forties, doesn't matter if he's wearing a baseball cap or if his tie is only half loosened. People can say what they want about the kind of man Will Gardner is, but once she's known all his little nuances, unguarded moments. She can't forget.

How his hair isn't always perfect, sticks flat against his forehead if he hasn't gotten a cut in long enough, and how sometimes he mumbles things in such a jaded manner, like he already knows the world is a killer and he's only the gun. How she'd joked, once, that she'd need medication before the end of the night.

Can't forget.

Even when she's all alone in the world, and everything is ashes.

Even when the apocalypse comes with its bloody end, and all she's left with is a shoe and regrets that could hang like a noose, ready for the taking.

In the end, she becomes just as jaded as he.

/

"It's life," he explains. "We're in constant danger of running off the road."

But she kisses him again, a few weeks later.

It's uncertain and desperate, like some wild thing clawing at the sides of its cage for release, and they've always been a tragedy tied together with her red lipstick, always two steps behind or ahead, and they don't know what they have until she's taking a lighter to it all. Burns it all to the ground hours later, but in that moment, she feels like she can just _exist._

Here is another truth:

They kissed in a car with the windows fogged up like nature protecting the secret of bees, and Will had taken her face in his hands and she'd tasted his mouth and peppermint and known, somewhere in the back of her harbinger mind, that it would be their last kiss.

She knew, and he didn't.

He had no idea.

/

Death does not make appointments.

/

The last time she sees Will's lips the color of life, he's smiling at her.

This means more than Alicia could have ever fathomed.

/

She doesn't remember how she gets to the hospital, later. She doesn't know if she drove herself, or if Eli got the car pulled around. She doesn't know anything until she moves through the corridor like a ghost in her own skin, all the bombs of destruction laying wake, and it feels like her chest is empty.

Numbness and disassociation are something she's all too familiar with, but when she finds Kalinda standing near a curtain, some measly shade of blue, she doesn't know how she manages to walk so calmly in her heels, how she's not crawling on her knees like a rational, shattered human being.

She doesn't know how she sees his body and doesn't flinch.

But it happens.

It happens, and Kalinda is looking at her like she's holding the gun that ruined everything in her own hand, pointing it at her own head, and Alicia fleetingly wonders if this is what having an out of body experience feels like, but she's looking at Will, and he's not Will. That's not Will, but it looks like Will, and the blood-

He must have been in pain.

He must have been _terrified, _and she moves closer because she can, because no one is stopping her, and by now she doesn't know how she could ever turn back. It's not real yet. It can't be real, because this is Will, and they have things they need to talk about. They have a life to figure out, have conversations that still haven't been had about a hell of a lot of things, and they've never even _talked, _and-

Alicia stares at Will's body without blinking, mouth a line.

She never wants to wear red again.

Because it's all there, crimson and tattered remains, and she knows that shirt, she knows that tie, and even if they haven't been physically close in two years, the patch of skin with a mole is close enough to the wound that she can recognize it, can close her eyes and open them again, and he's still there, with his endless sleep, and she wants to tell him to wake up.

She wants two years ago to be today, and she wants to be able to wake him up with a pancake breakfast, and she's losing it, she's losing everything she's ever thought was her own, losing her determination of her own fate and all that bullshit, and she's just standing there.

His hand is open, the muscles relaxed, in death, and-

He's _dead._

She reaches her hand down to touch him, remembers a fairytale where all it took was the touch of the beloved, some overdone cliché, and she barely rests her fingers on his palm before she finally, finally wakes up.

Alicia whimpers.

Her eyes are glistening, but she's not there yet, can't be at the edge yet, and Alicia moves back to feel again, to know, to realize, to ingrain into her memory, to memorize her nightmare while still conscious-

The temperature is frigid, and _his hands are always so cold,_ and Alicia's body convulses like a wet cat, shuddering, and-

"Alicia," Kalinda murmurs, and Alicia's head snaps up.

Kalinda's eyes are dark, her timbre breaking in several places, shaky, shaky, not real, not real. None of this is real. It's a bad dream. It's a bad dream, and even if Alicia knows her crutches are distantly ironic considering she knows the exact corners of hell. But Kalinda is struggling to find her own baring, settles for, "Alicia, they have to take the body, now."

There are other people here, and Alicia hadn't even-

She looks back down at his face, wills him to open his eyes, to yell, to hate, to be, to _exist, _and-

"I don't want him to be alone," she's barely audible, but grows stronger with every word. More convicted. More honest. Desperate. Pleading. "I don't want him to be alone."

She doesn't even know what she's saying, but she's reacting on instinct, opening her mouth with a heart that is flayed, all bloody, and-

"I won't let him to be alo -"

She breaks off. Alicia's face doesn't crumple, but she makes a choking sound, and-

"He won't be," Kalinda whispers, catching her attention, says it slow as to make sure Alicia comprehends each and every syllable. "I'll stay with him, Alicia. You need to go see Diane."

For some reason, Alicia does what she's told.

Doesn't look back.

Even when her lungs are filling with soot.

Even when she feels like a steel fist is wrapped around her windpipe.

/

Alicia won't remember this later, but just before she leaves, Kalinda stops her, passes something to her, tells her there's a drinking fountain just before the exit. "It will make it easier."

Alicia forgoes the water, and swallows the two Valium dry.

/

She finds herself in his office.

Just as he'd left it, because the thought never crossed his mind that he wouldn't be able to get to the signatures on the documents later, wouldn't be able to finish his cup of coffee when he got back from court-

And Alicia hasn't needed a fix in months, but it all smells like him, and it's too much.

It's _too much. _

"Please." The tears come thick and blurring. "Please. Will."

Silence is the loudest kind of noise.

/

Here is the worst truth of all:

Will never liked it when Alicia was weak.


End file.
